The
most surprising thing about Trudeau’s Shadow is the near-absence
of an elegaic tone, in spite of the somewhat lugubrious tone of its introduction
and publicity material. Edited by journalist Andrew Cohen and historian
J.L. Granatstein, the book is a collection of newly commissioned essays
from a broad range of sources, ranging from actress Linda Griffiths to
former Ontario NDP leader Bob Rae, from journalists Larry Zolf and Linda
McQuaig to Trudeau political allies Jim Coutts and Donald S. Macdonald
to cultural essayists Mark Kingwell and B.W. Powe. In spite of the
retrospective tone of every essay, there is no sense of Trudeau as anything
less then a continuing presence in the country’s political and intellectual
life today, in spite of his resolute physical absence.

The contributions
range in political orientation and personal reaction. Anybody who
holds the opinion that economic performance is the surest way of judging
the worth of a country’s leader need only read the back-to-back essays
by McQuaig and her fellow journalist (and political antipode) Andrew Coyne,
who find ways to show the former Prime Minister’s innocence or guilt, respectively,
in the creation of our current economic distress. Elsewhere we find that
Linda Griffiths’ memoir of flirtatious dancing with Trudeau, while researching
her play “Maggie and Pierre”, gives a more indelible, vital portrait of
the man than journalist Rick Salutin’s ruminations on Trudeau’s leftist
credentials contrasted, of course, with his own.

Like any
collection, the book is an uneven read, but the general tone of fascination,
rapt or grudging, with its subject, acts to unify the hand-wringing and
finger-pointing, the memoirs of encounters in friendship or political service
and the ruminative speculations on the meaning of the man. While hardly
useful as a biographical resource, Trudeau’s Shadow will doubtless
be pressed into use by future writers, looking for a pithy quote or a telling
anecdote to further explain the phenomenon of the fifteenth Prime Minister.